1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and system for classifying high-resolution melt (“HRM”) curves, and, more specifically, to a method and system for classifying HRM curves by genotype where the curves are represented by a mathematical function with varying coefficient values.
2. Description of the Related Art
High-Resolution Melt (“HRM”) is a molecular biology tool. This tool can be used to detect a variety of differences (e.g., mutations) in samples of double stranded DNA, which is based on the detected melting temperature/behavior of the double stranded DNA sequence(s) at issue. HRM is usually performed post PCR amplification, which is performed to obtain a sufficient number of copies of the DNA sequence(s) of interest.
Most current approaches to high-resolution melt classification involve software that (1) normalizes a series of HRM curves, and then (2) uses a subtraction plot comparing a given melt curve with a pre-defined control. Such a method is unable to probabilistically assess classification results; curves are assigned only a “yes” or “no” value for membership to a given genotype class. Such a method is also unable to evaluate and classify HRM curves across multiple runs of the thermal cycler (or other platform used to generate such curves), or across multiple platforms.